The Vehement Flame eBook

his sort, he told Edith, and it was evident that their
bachelor habits appealed to him, for he dined out
frequently; and when he did, he was careful not to
tell Eleanor where he was going, because once or twice,
when he had told her, she had called up the club or
house on the telephone about midnight to inquire if
“Mr. Curtis had started home?” ...
“I was worried about you, it was so late,”
she defended herself against his irritated mortification.
He used to report these stag parties to Edith, telling
her some of the stories he had heard; it didn’t
occur to him to tell any stories to Eleanor, because,
as Henry Houghton had once said, Maurice and his wife
didn’t “have the same taste in jokes.”
When Edith chuckled over this or that witticism (or
frowned at any opinion contrary to Maurice’s
opinion!) Eleanor sat in unsmiling silence. It
was about this time Maurice fell into the way of saying
“we” to Edith: “We” will
have tea in the garden; “we” will put in
a lot of bulbs on each side of the brick path; “we”
will go down to the square and hear the election returns.
Occasionally he remembered to say, “Why don’t
you come along, Eleanor?”

“No, thank you,” she said; and sometimes,
to herself, she added, “He keeps me out.”
The jealous woman always says this, never realizing
the deeper truth, which is that she keeps herself
out! Maurice did not notice how, all that winter,
Eleanor was keeping herself out. She was steadily
retreating into some inner solitude of her own.
No one noticed it, except Mrs. O’Brien—­and
perhaps fat, elderly, snarling Bingo, who must sometimes,
when his small pink tongue lapped her cheek, have tasted
tears. By another year, Eleanor’s mind had
so utterly diverged from Maurice’s that not
even his remorse (which he had grown used to, as one
grows used to some encysted thing) could achieve for
them any unity of living. She bored him, and
he hurt her; she loved him and tried to please him;
he didn’t love her, but tried to be polite; he
was not often angry with her, he wasn’t fond
enough of her to be angry! So, forgetful of that
security of the Stars—­Truth!—­to
which he had once aspired, he grew dully used to the
arid safety of untruth,—­though sometimes
he swore softly to himself at the tiresome irony of
the office nickname which, with an occasional gilt
hatchet, still persisted. He would remember that
evening of panic at the Mortons’, and think,
lazily, “She can’t possibly get on Lily’s
track!” So Lily lived in anxious thriftiness
at 16 Maple Street; and Maurice, no longer acutely
afraid of her, and only seeing her two or three times
a year, was more or less able to forget her, in his
growing pleasure in Edith’s presence in his
house—­a pleasure quite obvious to Eleanor.

As for Edith, she used to wonder, sometimes, why Eleanor
was so “up stage”? (that was her latest
slang); but it did not trouble her much, for she was
too generous to put two and two together. “Eleanor
has nervous prostration,” she used to tell herself,
with good-natured excuse for some especial coldness;
and she even tried, once in a while, “to make
things pleasant for poor old Eleanor!” “I
lug her in,” she told Johnny.